Adding hospitality carts to Barnstable’s two municipal courses, offering up food and beverages, perhaps even alcohol, has the unanimous support of the town’s golf committee.

At the Oct. 11 meeting, the committee signed on to a letter to the interim town manager and town council with positive recommendation for further investigation into roaming hospitality carts.

The letter, authored by committee member Dan Ginther, notes that since Massachusetts became the 49th state to allow alcohol sales from carts at municipal courses (sorry Alaska), courses that offer such services have a competitive advantage in the marketplace. The letter also noted that hospitality carts serving both food and beverages have become amenities that “avid golfers” expect from the courses they play.

In a discussion of rates in another portion of the meeting, the committee discussed steadily declining rounds over the past four years and ways to remain competitive with other area courses.

Adding hospitality carts as course amenities isn’t a new idea, but committee members were encouraged that there was a willingness to have a discussion on the possibility. Interim Director of Golf Bruce McIntyre said that Interim Town Manager Tom Lynch has expressed a willingness to have town regulatory staff take a look at what other towns have done.

“We haven’t gotten that far before,” McIntyre told the committee.

For his part, Lynch said that he’ll await the letter and further information from the committee, but emphasized that it is a request that the administration is responding to.

“It’s not something we’re initiating at this point,” Lynch said in an Oct. 13 phone interview.

Lynch had what he characterized as a casual conversation with regulatory services to determine what other towns do with respect to alcohol service on their courses, whether there have been issues or liabilities.

“A change like that would require quite a bit of research,” Lynch said.

Among the things he’d like to better understand is the actual demand for such an offering in the golfing community, and if it is a factor that drives business to courses.

“I don’t know of one sport where alcohol actually improves the play,” Lynch said, adding that there must be some other reason why some choose to make it available.

As discussed at the meeting, the idea would be for the existing concessionaires at the courses to expand their operations to include on-course carts. McIntyre believes that based on past and present conversations with concessionaires at both courses, they would be “very interested.”

McIntyre told the committee that should hospitality carts go forward, he would expect it to be done “in a manner in which the town’s hands are 100 percent off of anything to do with it in any way.”

The next step for the committee, McIntyre said, would be to sit back and see what the town is willing to do based on its investigation.